The Maricopa County Republican Party said Trump will be accompanied by immigration hardliner Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has been found by a federal judge to racially profile Latinos during enforcement activities.

What ever happened to the “universe-shattering” revelation promised by the sheriff’s lead investigator, Mike Zullo, in late 2013?

Reached by telephone, Zullo told WND in an interview his Cold Case Posse team commissioned by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office must resolve three legal issues before the new evidence can be revealed regarding the validity of the document posted online by the White House in 2011 as Obama’s birth certificate and a subsequent investigation of its origin....

A racial-profiling legal judgment against Arpaio and a subsequent, ongoing civil contempt case against the sheriff that has taken a bizarre turn have only made it more difficult, Zullo said.

“As far as releasing information, we’re pretty much under lock and key at this point,” he said.

But he insists the document posted by the White House in April 2011 is fraudulent.

“There are some very serious problems with that pdf file,” he told WND....

So far, he said, there is no credible evidence of where Obama was born.

“But I can tell you that I do not believe for one minute that he was born in the hospital proffered on the pdf,” Zullo said, referring to Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. “And I certainly do not believe that document was originally created in 1961.”

Trump is a buffoon, but even he seems shrewd enough to know that he and Arpaio ought to avoid the issue (which is why, if I were Reince Priebus, I'd be flooding this and other Trump events with attendees waving birther placards; even a lot of Fox addicts realize that birtherism is considered beyond the pale). Trump tried to sidestep the subject in a recent interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper:

"Honestly, I don't want to get into it," Trump said. "I'm about jobs, I'm about the military, I'm about doing the right thing for this country."

But to be clear, Trump is still not totally convinced that Obama was born in the country.

So at this rally there will probably be a laser-like focus on undocumented immigrants and how awful they allegedly are. You know the party is worried: Arizona senator Jeff Flake (a member of the Gang of Eight that tied to devise an immigration reform package a while back) tried to get the rally canceled, with no success:

According to The Washington Post, Sen. Jeff Flake asked the Republican Party of Maricopa County not to sponsor the event in Phoenix this Saturday's featuring presidential candidate Donald Trump and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Flake's appeal didn't work, it appears....

Flake told the Post, "As an elected official and as a Republican, I'm not excited about this, to say the least. I don't think that [Trump's] views are reflective of the party, particularly in Arizona, a border state."

Apparently Trump's views are very much reflective of the party's values in Arizona.

Any counterpoint to Trump using Bernie Sanders, even the innocuous tweet that compares crowd sizes will just encourage fostering false equivalencies of "Crazy Trump on the right/Crazy Sanders on the left." On that basis I'm skeptical of seeing Trump's rise in popularity as being a good thing for anybody, progressives included.

What time is it, Birthers of a Nation? It's The Donald Presidential Rally Time, sponsored by Trump International!

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